April 28, 2015

Two words are anagrams if they consist of the same letters, with the same number of occurrences, in a different order. For instance, DEPOSIT and DOPIEST are anagrams (aren’t you glad you know that), and OPTS, POTS, TOPS and STOP form an anagram class.

Your task is to write a program that takes two strings as input and determines whether or not they are anagrams; you may assume that the strings consist of only the letters A through Z in upper case. You must provide at least two different algorithms that work in fundamentally different ways. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

April 24, 2015

We have today another from our inexhaustible list of interview questions:

Given a list of positive integers, find the smallest number that cannot be calculated as the sum of the integers in the list. For instance, given the integers 4, 13, 2, 3 and 1, the smallest number that cannot be calculated as the sum of the integers in the list is 11.

Your task is to write a program that solves the interview question. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

April 21, 2015

Today’s exercise is a simple little interview question:

Generate the pairs of cartesian coordinates within a square bounded by (1,1) and (n,n) ordered by their product in ascending order. For instance, when n is 3, the coordinates are (1,1), (1,2), (2,1), (1,3), (3,1), (2,2), (2,3), (3,2) and (3,3). Can you find a solution with time complexity better than O(n2)?

Your task is to write a program to solve the interview question. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

April 17, 2015

Fermat’s Last Theorem, which dates to the seventeenth century states that there are no solutions in integers to the equation xn + yn = zn for n > 2; the Theorem was finally proved a few years ago by Andres Wiles. In the eighteenth century, Euler conjectured that for any n > 2, it would take at least n terms of the form xin to sum to an n th power. That conjecture held until the age of computers, in 1967, when Lander and Parkin found the counter-example 275 + 845 + 1105 + 1335 = 1445.

Your task is to write a program that finds counter-examples to Euler’s Conjecture. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

April 14, 2015

We studied mixed-radix arithmetic in a previous exercise. In today’s exercise we look at a different kind of non-standard positional notation: balanced ternary, which is a base-3 number system that uses -1, 0 and 1 as its “trits” rather than 0, 1 and 2. For instance, the number -47 is written as (-1 1 1 -1 1) in balanced ternary, which is equivalent to -34 + 33 + 32 – 31 + 30. No separate sign is needed when using balanced notation; the sign of the leading trit is the sign of the whole number.

Arithmetic on balanced ternary numbers is done using the grade-school algorithms. Addition is done right-to-left with a carry; it is easy and fun to work out the plus-table. Subtraction is done by adding the negative, which can be computed by changing the sign of every trit. Multiplication works trit-by-trit through the multiplier, shifting at each trit.

Your task is to write functions that perform arithmetic on balanced ternary integers. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

April 10, 2015

Today’s exercise won’t ask you to write code. Let me tell you why.

I bought a new printer to replace my old printer that had failed. Both the salesman at Micro Center and the printer manufacturer’s sales rep, who was in the store that day, assured me that the printer would work with my Debian Linux system, and the manufacturer’s sales rep even gave me the web page where I could download the driver. I bought the printer, took it home, and installed the driver.

It didn’t work. My computer would no longer boot. I took computer and printer to the Knowledge Bar at Micro Center, but they don’t have sufficient Linux experience to figure out what’s wrong. After a few days, I resigned myself to re-installing the operating system.

That’s when I found out what had happened. At the point where the Linux installer asks you to specify the partition table, it told me that I had an invalid partition table and asked me to fix it, manually, before proceeding with the installation. Somehow, installing a printer driver corrupted the partition table. I won’t tell you the name of the printer manufacturer that was stupid enough to manage that trick, but it’s a big name that you would certainly recognize. Needless to say, I will be returning the printer and buying a different printer from a different manufacturer.

But before I do that, I have to fix my partition table, re-install my operating system, and restore my data from backups. As I write this on Thursday afternoon, I’m partway through that process, but I have already verified that I have a list of all installed software and that my file backup is readable.

Your task is to make sure that your backup and restore procedures are effective; if they aren’t, fix them. You should at least perform a single-file restore to demonstrate that your backup and restore procedure has at least a minimal chance of working when you need it. It looks like I will end up okay, but not without a lot of worry and a few choice words directed at a printer manufacturer that ought to know better.

April 7, 2015

Mixed-radix number systems have a base, or radix, that varies at each position. For instance, the old-style British pounds, shillings and pence form a mixed-radix system where there are twelve pence in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound, and calendars form a mixed-radix system where there are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, and seven days in a week.

Your task is to write a program that accepts a definition of a mixed-radix system — for instance, (7 24 60 60) for the calendar mentioned above — and performs addition and subtraction of numbers written in that system. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

April 3, 2015

Wednesday was April Fools’ Day, and I was feeling frisky, so I implemented the reluctant search algorithm from Pessimal Algorithms and Simplexity Analysis by Andrei Broder and Jorge Stolfi. Their algorithm takes time O(2n), which is worse than the naive brute force O(n), to find the index of a target x in a sorted array. We looked at a different algorithm that paper in a previous exercise. I’ll leave it to you to fetch the paper and enjoy the sincerity of the authors’ pessimality.

Your task is to implement the reluctant search algorithm. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.